The Product’s Great Journey: A Multi-triangular Agile Approach

Abstract

Within a constantly competitive scenario, productive organizations have been looking for alternatives to improve all their internal processes in order to try to stay alive among competitors, in terms of economic, environmental and social sustainability. Thus, it is no longer common for someone or some isolated sector of a company to make a decision on their own. The decisions became collegiate. However, some sectors end up having more relevant arguments at each stage of a product’s great journey. At every moment of the process, from conceptualization (cradle) to disposal (grave or reuse), some departments become protagonists, while others become supporting actors. In this approach, the great journey of a product could be divided into “triangle of forces” structured by stakeholder representatives. The objective of this specific paper is to evaluate the activities of the conceptualization phase of a product that is observed as the first of these triangles whose vertices are formed by representatives from the Marketing, Industrial Design and Product Engineering areas. The proposed triangle model aims to organize the decision-making process during the development of a new product. Assigning leadership responsibilities and support functions to each sector at each stage of the project. This proposal would transform the great product journey into a star formed by these triangles of power, creating an agile and interactive environment of simultaneous engineering. As a result, this study presents a proposal of fundamental activities involved in the initial triangle of the task force conceptualization phase and the interrelationships among the areas of Marketing, Industrial Design and Product Engineering that happen along these processes.